Good Evening, Mr. Wallenberg (1990)

Description

On Schindler's List there were hundreds of names. On Raoul Wallenberg's there were tens of thousands. "A film of epic ambitions" (The New York Times), Good Evening, Mr. Wallenberg chronicles the last days of the war in Budapest. It is a moving and sensitive portrait of internationally known hero, Raoul Wallenberg, a small-scale businessman whose life was transformed after he witnessed bodies being thrown from a train on its way to Auschwitz. International film star Stellan Skarsgård (Aberdeen, Dancer in the Dark, Good Will Hunting, Amistad, Breaking the Waves, The Hunt for Red October) "is merely perfect" (New York Post) as Raoul Wallenberg, an attache to the Swedish Embassy who moved to Budapest, Hungary in 1944 to help Jews escape Adolph Eichmann's deadly path. Wallenberg saved over 60,000 people in Budapest's Jewish ghetto by helping them escape Hungary with Swedish papers ("Wallenberg passports"), or getting them placed in protective housing. His greatest challenge came in 1945, when he saved the lives of some 65,000 Jews in the ghetto by forcing the hand of the German general responsible for their fate. On January 17, 1945, Wallenberg was taken to Moscow as a Soviet prisoner. He was never released, and his fate has remained a mystery.